Obviously You, Maybe You, Artificial You: Exploring the Impact of Artificial Intelligence Technologies on Consciousness and Personal Identity

A review of Susan Schneider's book Artificial You explores how artificial intelligence and related technologies challenge understandings of consciousness and moral attitudes toward nonhumans and posthumans. The book examines what it would mean for an AI to be conscious, questioning whether consciousness requires a feeling of self-awareness or exists on a continuum from simple awareness to complex self-reflection. Schneider considers whether human enhancement with brain microchips could fracture identity and transcend humanness, and whether uploading consciousness to a computer transforms it into something no longer human. The review notes that Schneider leaves the definition of consciousness open to explore deep moral questions about AI's moral status.

Study at a glance

Abstract

In the acknowledgements section of her 2019 book Artificial You, Susan Schneider relates that “This book was a delight to write.” (Schneider 2019, 153) It shows. The book is a delight to read. Artificial You is relatively short and, thankfully, without a lot of neurophilosophical jargon. Its primary objective is to present a multi-faceted exploration of how artificial intelligence (AI) and its related technologies might challenge our understanding of consciousness and our moral attitudes toward nonhumans, maybe-humans, and post humans. The first chapters of Schneider’s book explore what it would mean for an AI model to be conscious. Schneider’s initial response is the familiar: Consciousness means “it feels like something to be you.” (16) I’ve always found that characterization too obscure. Consider the robust conversation around whether slime molds are conscious (Skiles 2019). Slime molds don’t possess anything resembling the molecular constitution of neurons and neural networks, but they exhibit astonishingly intelligent-like, acutely adaptive responses to their environments. Whether they are conscious is baffling on two counts: It seems doubtful that they have a feeling of being aware, so they have no awareness of what it’s like to be them. But even if they did, how could humans know it? And if we could know it, what ethical platforms would we use to assess whether that awareness would be morally significant? Some microbiologists claim that slime molds have rudimentary consciousness while a “feeling like something to be you” implies a self-awareness that only certain higher vertebrates possess. My graduate days spent studying Husserl led me to understand consciousness as awareness of something, whose sophistication or acuity exists on a continuum—from a slime mold’s awareness of nutrients in its biomolecular environments to the exhausting self-awareness of a Kierkegaard or Henry James. But leaving the matter of “feeling like something to be you” unanswered allows Schneider a certain latitude in exploring the intersection of AI or advanced technologies with human cognition and identity. Thus, she asks early in the book: If humans choose to enhance themselves with advanced hardware like brain microchips that can dramatically improve memory or thinking, is there a point at which the accumulation of those enhancements would fracture our sense of identity and transcend our “humanness”? This problem is especially interesting if we consider the transhumanist aspiration of uploading one’s consciousness onto a computer. Schneider makes the provocative observation that a human consciousness previously subserved by human neurons but now uploaded into a computer whose mechanical substrate consists of transistorized parts no longer seems a human consciousness. When I upload my consciousness to a computer, what does consciousness “become”? Furthermore, if an essential aspect of human consciousness is my awareness of myself, especially understanding (or feeling) myself as patterns of neural events that enable and integrate memory, behaviors, cognitions and the like, then transmogrifying those neurological patterns into entirely new, artificial ones that a computer can run casts enormous doubt on whether they have retained their essential “humanness.” Again, when I upload my consciousness to a computer, what does it become? Do I remain me? Does it matter? Schneider argues that it certainly does matter as nothing short of the deepest moral questions humanity can pose to itself are at stake. Of course, a computer can be programed to relate what it feels like to be it. But how would we evaluate the moral status of a sophisticated, future AI whose cognitive and